An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France

by Jean Le Rond d' Alembert

It is assured that the late cardinal Passionei, who detested these fathers, (for which he might have good reasons) pushed his hatred against them so far, as not to admit into his fine and numerous library any writer of the society. I regret this, for the sake both of the library and of the master; the one lost a number of good books by it; and the other, so philosophical, as we are assured, in other respects, was not at all so on this occasion. If any thing can console the Jesuits, it is that the same cardinal, so sworn an enemy of all their works, had the misfortune to countenance and extol the rhapsodies of that same Abraham Chaumeix, whose very name now is become ridiculous, and who is at present turned down to his proper place, after having been quoted and celebrated as a kind of father of the church[4].

The society owes to the form of its institution (so decried in other respects) this variety of talents which distinguish it. They reject no sort of abilities, and require no other condition, in order to be admitted among its members, but a capacity of being useful. To engage our liberty, we must pay every where, even among the Mendicants. The Jesuits know nothing of this paltry interest; they receive with pleasure and gratuitously every person from whom they hope to draw any good; nobody is useless among them; of those from whom they expect the least, they make, according to their own expression, missionaries for the villages, or martyrs for the Indies. They have not even disdained very great personages, little worthy of the titles which they bore when they made themselves Jesuits, as a Charles of Lorrain, and several others: their names have served at least as a decoration to the order, if they were good for nothing else: we may call them the honoraries of the society.

Two other reasons seem to have contributed to give the Jesuits, above all the other orders, the advantage of a greater number of men estimable for their talents and their works: the first is the duration of their noviciate, and the law which permits them not to bind themselves by the last vows before the age of thirty-three. The superiours have the more time to know their subjects, to judge of them, and to direct them towards the object for which they are most proper: these subjects moreover, being engaged at a mature age, after a long probation, and all the time necessary for reflexion, are less exposed to disgust and to repentance, more attached to the society, and more disposed to employ their talents for its glory, and for their own, which comes only afterward.

A second reason of the superiority of the Jesuits over the other orders, in respect to the sciences and knowledge, is, that they have sufficient time for resigning themselves up to study, enjoying in this point as much liberty as can possibly be enjoyed in a regular community, not being subjected, as the other orders are, to the minute practices of devotion, and to offices which absorb the greatest part of the day. If it were not known that hatred makes arms of every thing, we should have some difficulty to believe, that during their great and fatal law-suit, it was gravely objected to them as a crime, in some of the Jansenist pamphlets, that they did not assemble together so often as other monks, to say, in common, matins and prayers; as if a religious society (the first duty of which is to be useful) had nothing better to do than to chant over heavily bad Latin several hours in the day. It will be said perhaps, that religious orders are instituted only for prayer: be it so; but in that case let the religious shut themselves up in their houses, in order to pray there quite at their ease, and let them be hindered from meddling in any thing else.

This suppression of praying and chanting, among the Jesuits, before it became a subject of reproach against them, had been matter of pleasantry, agreeably to the genius of our nation: “The Jesuits,” said they, “cannot sing, for birds of prey never do: they are,” said they again, “a set of folks who get up at four in the morning, in order to repeat together the litanies at eight in the evening.” The Jesuits had the good sense to laugh the first at these French witticisms, and to make no change in their manner of living; they thought it more serviceable and more honourable to them, to have Petaus and Bourdaloues, than triflers and chanters.

It must be confessed nevertheless, that in the sciences and the arts, two kinds have been but feebly cultivated by the Jesuits: these are French poetry and philosophy. The best of their French poets is beneath mediocrity; yet French poetry requires, in order to excel in it, a delicacy of feeling and taste, which cannot be acquired but by frequenting the world much more than a religious ought to permit himself to do. This school of urbanity and delicacy is perhaps the only thing that was wanting to the Jesuit Le Moine to make him a poet of the first rank; for that Jesuit, according to the judgement given of him by one of our greatest masters, had, in other respects, an imagination that was prodigious[5]. If it be asked why the Jesuits have not had French poets, we must ask why the universities have not had more of them, and why so many modern Latin poets, taken throughout the several communities, and throughout all conditions, have not been able to succeed in making two tolerable French lines in verse.

Philosophy (I mean the true, for school-learning is nothing but the dregs and refuse of it) has not shone with greater lustre among the Jesuits; but has it been more brilliant among the other orders? It is almost impossible that a member of any community should become a great philosopher: the spirit of a society, of a monastick society in particular, and more perhaps than any other, the domineering spirit of the Jesuits, that of a servile devotion to their superiors, are so many fetters to reason, repugnant to that freedom of thinking which is so necessary to philosophy. Malebranche is the only philosopher of eminence that ever belonged to a regular congregation; but that congregation was composed of free-men; and, besides, Malebranche is perhaps less a great philosopher, than an excellent philosophic writer.

If any order (by the by) could have hoped to dispute with the Jesuits the pre-eminence in the sciences and in literature, and perhaps to have borne away the palm from them, it is this congregation of the Oratory, of which Malebranche was a most distinguished member. The freedom enjoyed there, without being ever hampered by vows, the permission of thinking differently from their superiors, and of employing their talents according to their own pleasure, this was what furnished the congregation of the Oratory with excellent preachers, profound scholars, men illustrious in every way. Accordingly the Jesuits were very sensible what they had to fear from such rivals. They persecuted them; and the members of the Oratory had the folly to expose a weak side to them by becoming Jansenists[6]. By this means they furnished a pretext to the attacks of their enemies, and have had the grief to see the decay of their congregation brought about by their own fault. They have indeed just now collected a few tattered remains from the plunder of the Jesuits; but these remains will hardly ever be able to replace what they have lost. We ought, besides, to do them the justice to own, that they testified not any eagerness to profit by the ruin of their adversaries: the society in its misfortune experienced, on the part of the Oratory, a moderation of which they had never given them the example. But be this moderation counterfeit or sincere, it is difficult to persuade one’s-self that the Oratory will ever recover with lustre the blows which have been given it by the Jesuits: the varnish of Jansenism with which it is still stained, and which renders it at least suspected by the greater part of the bishops, the almost general prejudice of the public, and of the greater part of the magistrates, against all communities, of whatever kind they be, and, above all, the philosophic spirit which makes every day great progress, seems to forebode the end of this, and of other fraternities.

If the culture of the sciences and of letters has contributed to render the society commendable, and intrigue to make it powerful, another circumstance has not a little served to render it formidable to its enemies: and that is the union of all its members for the good of the common cause. In other societies, the interests and reciprocal hatred of individuals almost always hurt the good of the corps; but among the Jesuits it is quite otherwise. Not that in this society the individuals love each other better than elsewhere; perhaps they even hate one another more, being by their very constitutions spies and informers, from their birth, upon each other: yet attack a single person among them, you are sure of having the whole society for your enemy. Thus heretofore the Senate and Roman people, often divided among themselves by intestin dissensions, united at the bare name of the Carthaginians or of Mithridates. There is not a Jesuit who may not say, like the wicked spirit in scripture, “My name is Legion.” Never did republican love his country as every Jesuit loves his society: the very lowest of its members interests himself in its glory, of which he thinks some rays reflect upon himself: there is not (if I may presume to say so) even to their brother the apothecary, or the cook, one among them who is not proud and jealous of it. They are all at once put in action by this single spring, which one man directs at his pleasure; and it is not without reason that they have been defined “a naked sword, the hilt of which is at Rome.” The love which they have for their society, subsists even in almost all those who have left it: whether it be a real attachment founded upon gratitude, or a policy founded on interest or on fear, there is hardly an ex-Jesuit who preserves not his connexions with his old brethren; and who, even tho’ he has reason to complain of them, does not shew himself attached to their interests, and ready to defend them against their enemies. For the rest, this attachment of the Jesuits to their society, can be nothing but the effect of that pride which it inspires them with, and not at all of the advantages which it procures for each of its members. Independently of the little confidence and real friendship which they have one for the other, and the severe life which they lead within their houses, individuals, whatever merit they may have, are not at all considered in the corps, but in proportion to the talent which they have for intrigue: modest merit, or such as is confined to the labour of the closet, is there unknown, little considered, sometimes persecuted, if unfortunately the pressing interest of the society demand it. We have seen in these late times the fathers Brumoi and Bougeant, the last of the Jesuits who had any true and solid merit, die of chagrin under the weight of the persecutions which their fraternity were obliged to make them suffer: these two men, who were greater philosophers, and more enlightened, than their state in life seemed to permit, were sacrificed by the society to the clamours which they had excited; the one by approving a work, in which the regent of the kingdom (who had been dead about twenty years before) was indirectly attacked; the other, by a philosophical joke on “the language of beasts,” for which they obliged him to make reparation, by confining him to the college of la Flêche, and charging him with the making of a catechism, which brought him down to the grave, overwhelmed with disgust and vexation. A hundred years before, Petau, the famous Petau, had like to have experienced fate very nearly similar, for having pretended, that before the council of Nice the church was not fully determined on the divinity of the word[7]. He died in the college of the Jesuits at Paris, abandoned and in want of every thing. It seems as if the device of the society had been that of the ancient Romans; Salus populi suprema lex esto[8].

To all these means of augmenting their consideration and their credit, they join another no less efficacious: this is the regularity of their conduct and manners. Their discipline on this point is as severe as it is prudent; and whatever calumny may have published concerning it, it must be confessed, that no religious order gives less handle in this respect. Even those among them who have taught the most monstrous doctrine, who have written on the most obscene subjects, have led the most edifying and the most exemplary lives. It was at the feet of the crucifix that the pious Sanchez wrote his abominable and disgusting work: and it has been said, in particular, of Escobar, equally known by the austerity of his manners, and the looseness of his doctrines, that he purchased heaven very dear for himself, but bestowed it at an easy rate upon others.